Reality Television

It’s full of trivia and artificial things; things which have arisen in the name of entertainment. Everywhere you look there is a stream of mindless celebrities willing – some would say desperate – to eat tropical bugs to give themselves a chance of being famous, again. It reminds me of a sad film I once saw called “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They”.

There are also some of the best and most informative documentary programmes we have ever seen. Such a mixture, and, as usual, it’s a matter of personal choice – and a bit of effort…

Television. It’s changed a lot since I was a boy… Perhaps not all for the better. But it’s not the purpose of this blog to complain about the ‘box’. We are all entitled to our leisure time and to choose how we spend it. To me, there is a sense here of a ‘race to the bottom’ about a whole layer of modern entertainment. This seems to go hand in hand with a view of life as a comic strip, where there must be good guys and bad guys and violent resolutions. Superhero movies don’t help. The truth is complex. Resolution of problems always involves compromise. There is no black and white.

How about considering the humble TV in a different way: as a reflection of the mind and human consciousness, it’s an experiment that opens up a set of parallels that are fascinating.

The TV shows us a flat screen that our minds have learned to convert back into our native 3D. With a well made drama programme that we can be ‘lost’ in, the experience is a good approximation of being there. Children can be traumatised by scary TV programmes. Adults sometimes forget the degree to which they cannot separate it from reality. Only later in life do we see that the ‘scare’ can be switched off inside ourselves, but only if we ‘pull back’ from the flat screen experience and deny it its imaginative power. My wife still can’t and hides her face behind a cushion with really scary films…

In ‘switching off’ what appears to be present lies a mystical parallel. Can the television teach us to do the same thing with life, itself?

I’m watching a bunch of gym-obsessed twenty-somethings flaunt themselves on an island in the sun. The women are blonde and beautiful; the men shaped like Greek gods… But their conversation could be from a junior school. The whole thing is entirely artificial. I mutter under my breath and switch it over. It’s a documentary about plastic waste and what we are doing to our oceans. I care about this, so I sit down and watch, clutching my cup of tea. This is real… and painful. I wish the perfect sun worshippers were watching this, too. We could us their energies…

Can we, in life, switch over channels? To do this we have to find the equivalent of us being on our comfy chair and watching the TV. This is entirely possible and is one of the basic techniques that we teach in the Silent Eye School of Consciousness.

We need to, literally, push the world away from our eyeballs. Sound crazy? Well, the reason the world is painted on our eyeballs is that we identify with what we see. Like the child with the television, we can’t see the screen and ourselves at the same time. By developing this dual consciousness – which is the work of only a few months – we can begin to watch our own life as though it were a screen. In fact it is a kind of screen, one on which we project much of our existence. We see this as happening to us, but, really, we are happening to ourselves. At least at the mundane levels of life.

Once we begin to penetrate the understanding of the ‘world as television’ we can start to look for the truly real…. and that is a very different journey.

Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

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